


Unexplainable Stories

by openended



Category: Grey's Anatomy, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-28
Updated: 2011-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-19 20:49:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He smiles at Cristina in a way that makes her think that he knows she’s already going to take the job.  She resolutely decides to turn him down, no matter what it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unexplainable Stories

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally for nursebadass, who requested _you know my flavor but if you can't write them, I would happily take Burke + Addison friendship that alludes to my flavor and Owen dying some sort of violent bloody death by zombies/falling off the face of the earth/disappearing into something called a stargate/being abducted by aliens/having a cruciato (I think...going for the HP reference too!) spell cast on him by some crazy bitch named Bellatrix._ Which is not at all what she received.

She frowns at the phone. She blinks at it, as if facial expressions will make the message on her voicemail make sense. She replays the message again, for good measure.

 _“Doctor Yang, this is General Jack O’Neill with the United States Air Force. I’d like to meet with you - I have a job for you, if you’re interested. I’ll be in Seattle on Friday. Let’s say the Archfield Hotel restaurant, 7:00.”_

Someone announces over the intercom that she’s needed in the OR at the same moment her pager goes off, alerting her to the same pressing need. She scribbles _Archfield – 7p – Friday_ on a Post-It, sticks it on her desk, and deletes the message before sprinting out of her office. She collides into one of her interns, who knows that it’s better to tell her which patient is on the verge of dying than wasting breath on an apology.

 

* * *

 

General O’Neill is not hard to pick out among the restaurant patrons. Even if he weren’t wearing his dress blues, Cristina suspects she would’ve made her way to the silver-haired man in the corner. He stands up, but she pulls her chair out for herself and doesn’t bother with the handshake. Her ex-husband is long gone, but she still has a bit of a problem with the military. And she performed three medical miracles before lunch today: nothing intimidates her.

“What could you possibly want with me?” Cristina asks, bluntly, figuring it best to jump into the reason for the meeting. It’s better if he knows from the start that she’s not someone who can be catered to. She orders steak and a red wine that reminds her of Burke because it’s the only wine she’s ever had that she likes and, after a split second of hesitation, adds a baked potato and a salad because this is on the government’s dime and she isn’t sure she actually ate lunch.

O’Neill requests something lighter – she thinks chicken, or maybe fish; she’s focused on the open briefcase sitting next to him and the folder sticking out of the top that reads **FIED. es ly** – with a hint of sadness, like someone will yell at him if he orders the steak, and politely turns down the waiter’s offer of some molten chocolate dessert that will take an hour to prepare and must be ordered now. He smiles at Cristina in a way that makes her think that he knows she’s already going to take the job.

She resolutely decides to turn him down, no matter what it is.

“You have an impressive record, Dr. Yang,” he says, with the uncomfortable precision of someone who has spent the past few years around senators and presidents and top-level officers but didn’t start out with the intention to ever set foot in Washington.

“I know,” she says. And she does; by all standards, most of her patients over the last year should have died on the table.

General O’Neill smirks and waits for the waiter to place a basket of bread on the table and drizzle olive oil and balsamic vinegar on a small plate in an attractive pattern and disappear again. “We have our own doctors with impressive records,” he says, unfolding the napkin and poking around for a piece of bread that meets his standards, “but most of them are otherwise occupied.”

“I’m not running a hospital in Afghanistan,” she says, her eyes narrowing.

He chuckles and swirls the bread through the olive oil and vinegar. “Never said that was the job.” He chews thoughtfully.

Unable to hold out - she’s now convinced she didn’t eat lunch - she takes her own piece of bread out of the basket. “Why don’t you tell me what the job is?”

His eyes cast around the crowded restaurant and she recalls Owen talking about the black ops guys who never stopped watching everything, even when they were missing an arm and bleeding from the skull. “Frontiers of medicine,” he says finally and Cristina knows that whatever it is, it’s not running a hospital outside of Kandahar. “New stuff, cutting edge technology.”

She tries, unsuccessfully, to get details from him in the twenty minutes before their dinners arrive. She should have known better than to attempt to one-up a three-star Air Force general, but she hasn’t bantered with anyone in a while and it’s refreshing even if she’s a bit rusty. By the time their food appears, she thinks she has her groove back. What she doesn’t have, however, is any idea what General O’Neill is recruiting her for.

Annoyingly, he has her interest piqued. As she cuts into her perfectly-cooked steak, she catches a small smirk on his lips and resists the urge to kick him under the table.

They again deny dessert, but linger at the table. There’s a line of people at the door, but Cristina suspects that nobody is going to tell General Jack O’Neill to please vacate his seat so other customers can dine. He asks her questions that she doesn’t quite understand, but that she eventually figures out are designed to assess her ability to keep a secret and work under pressure and invent medicine on the fly.

“How comfortable are you working on non-human species?”

And, apparently, discover how comfortable she is with things that are extraordinarily bizarre.

Cristina nearly chokes on her last sip of wine. She frowns at the phrasing of the question and her mind flashes to an ex-boyfriend from medical school who spent the entire weekend watching The X-Files instead of studying for finals. “I once removed the spleen of my landlord’s dog,” she says, because it’s true; she did it under duress and because Izzie had just left them and even if the blonde had gone a little crazy there for a moment, part of Izzie stuck with her (and it was just her luck that it was the save-the-animals part, not the crazy baking part).

O’Neill smiles and she knows that she didn’t answer the question he’d asked. She blinks at him like she’d blinked at her phone three days ago, hoping that it will force him to make sense. She tries to stop the neurons from firing in that direction, but it only makes them fire faster. “You can’t be serious,” she says, because he can’t. There’s no way.

“There’s a patient on your table suffering from an unknown and unrecognizable pathogen. Any antibiotics and antivirals you throw at him are ineffective. What do you do?”

“You expect me to make that decision without knowing all of the diagnostic details?”

“You don’t need to,” he says. She knows that, no matter what she says, she’s not going to get the details. Not yet, anyway.

“Get him as stable as possible and return, in full biohazard gear, to the place where he contracted the pathogen. Take samples of everything. See if I can find the pathogen and develop a cure.”

O’Neill raises one eyebrow, slightly – the only indication that he’s intrigued by her answer. “Most people would say that they’d call some expert or re-read an immunology textbook.”

“It’s a pathogen previously undiscovered by science, General; no expert or textbook will save the guy.”

He takes a sip of his water and checks his watch. “I have to catch a plane. Here’s my card,” he slips her an embossed business card. “Think about it. Call me on Monday if you’re interested.”

“You’re not going to tell me what it is, first?”

He stands and, for a moment, looks like he’s contemplating doing exactly that. “Nope,” he says with a smile. He picks up his briefcase and the top file falls out – now reading **CLASSIFIED. Eyes Only** – onto the floor. He catches her eye and looks down at the fallen file. “It’s good to meet you, Doctor Yang.”

This time, Cristina stands and accepts the handshake. She waits for him to leave the restaurant before crawling under the table to pick up the folder.

* * *

  
Most of the really interesting bits are blacked out, which infuriates her. But she doesn’t need the really interesting bits to figure out the rest.

She stares at the file, spread out over her living room floor in front of the never-used fireplace. She’s read the entire contents, in full, three times. Phrases jump out at her as her eyes rove over the paper covering the cherry hardwood.

 _Unknown alien pathogen._

 _Contracted on [redacted] while performing routine reconnaissance on [redacted]_

 _Spores represent pollen in structure, but appear to act viral._

 _Similar behavior changes to [redacted]: aggression, reversion to early human characteristics, loss of speech faculties._

 _Returned to [redacted] to collect samples._

 _Naturally-occurring organism._

A slip of bright yellow sticks out from underneath a brightly-colored image of the pathogen. Cristina picks up the picture and flips it over. There’s a Post-It stuck on the back:

 _Y – take the job._

She instantly recognizes the handwriting.

And thinks that maybe she can make a distinction between the Army and the Air Force.

* * *

  
Predictably, there’s confusion at the hospital when she quits and tells everyone, simply, “the Air Force” when they ask her where she’s going. Meredith asks her to stay, but she shakes her head. Cristina will always need her person, and she tells Meredith this, but she needs a change from Seattle (at least, this is the personal reason she gives, because the professional one is obvious). She offers everyone the party line O’Neill told her to give: she’s going to work at an Air Force hospital with experimental technology and treatments. While it may be technically true, she knows that it’s about the biggest line of bullshit she’s ever fed anyone in her life.

Technically, the Cheyenne Mountain base has a hospital. That she will be working at. And, technically, she will be working with experimental technology and treatments.

It’s best for everyone involved that she sticks to the Air Force-approved language and leaves out the bit regarding other planets, alien viruses, energy weapons, and Stargate Command.

* * *

  
General O’Neill meets her at the security gates to Cheyenne Mountain. He smiles and offers her a cup of coffee and hands her a security badge and waves at the airman manning the security gate.

She tries not to think of the absurdity of the fact that while she is traveling 27 levels down into a military base outside Colorado Springs to start what General O’Neill called “the adventure of a lifetime” (out of his mouth, it sounded pretty corny and she called him on that; he glared and told her to drink her coffee), Meredith, Alex and Callie are packing up her apartment in Seattle. Apparently there was some urgency in replacing the previous chief surgeon that could not wait for even two days while she put her life into boxes.

As soon as they step off the elevator, an alarm sounds and someone shouts “Unscheduled offworld activation” over the intercom. Cristina flattens herself to a wall while armed Marines sprint past her. General O’Neill remains unfazed, though her own heart is beating more rapidly than she’d like and she can taste the adrenaline at the back of her tongue, so she suspects this is a frequent occurrence she might as well get used to.

He’d briefed her in person once she’d accepted the job and left her a hefty (and uncensored) stack of reading material. She stayed up all night and even called in sick – something she hasn’t done since she was eight and had the flu and her mother threatened to tie her to the bed if she wouldn’t stay home voluntarily – to finish going through it all. The physics of the Stargate confuses her, but she doesn’t need to know how to work the device: just treat people who come through it.

When O’Neill first mentioned aliens, she was tempted to tell him that he was making this up. But something in his eyes gave away that this was no joke, and she went on to learn that the Air Force has been exploring the galaxy for the past decade, befriending some aliens, but apparently pissing off most. She now knows the history of the Goa’uld and how they took humans from Earth to populate the galaxy (and, to be honest, she’d always thought there was something alien-looking about the Pyramids); she also knows about the Ori and that the plague that swept the globe a few years back was in no way the flu that the government played it to be. She knows that now they’re in a fragile balance of (mostly) galactic peace, which is proving to be more dangerous than galactic war: soldiers are less careful of what they eat, what they touch and, on more than one occasion, who they sleep with.

But she’s used to that, the inappropriate sleeping around. Just not the side effect of turning the infected soldier’s ears neon blue.

“Shall we?” O’Neill gestures for her to walk up a set of stairs to an observation room full of Air Force officers and blinking lights and expensive-looking equipment.

A short, bespectacled man looks up at another general – Cristina suspects that this is the General Landry she read about – with a report. “It’s the Alpha Site, sir.”

Landry nods. “Open the iris.”

Cristina blinks at the gigantic circular object in the room below. She blinks harder as a coating of metal spirals outward to reveal a shimmering blue center. “This has got to stop,” she mutters to herself, referring to the blinking-makes-it-less-weird theory. She quickly looks around to make sure that no one heard her. It wouldn’t do well to have everyone think that the new doctor is nuts before she’s even got to meet them all.

Four figures walk out of the blue, two of whom are carrying a stretcher. Cristina tunes out the explanations that are shouted up to the control room – something about a broken leg, a GDO being lost in a swamp and an inability to hop – and focuses on the fifth man who comes through. “Can I...?” She asks General O’Neill, gesturing to the gate room.

He smiles. “Go right ahead. Turn left when you get to the bottom of the stairs.”

She turns and runs down, aware that there’s already a medical team down there to take care of the man with the broken leg. She tells herself that she just wants to see the thing up close before the wormhole closes.

But she stops just short of the gate room doors. “So this is where you went,” she says.

Preston Burke smiles widely at her and pats the injured soldier on the arm. “It is.”


End file.
